Samuel Fuller Quotes

I only make storyboards for action scenes. Once you make a storyboard, you don't film; it can be a stiff move.

You always start a fight scene or an action scene with, 'What are we learning about this character at the moment, and how are we gonna arc him or her in the next three minutes,' and it's no different with 'Deadpool' or 'Atomic Blonde' or 'John Wick.'

Usually, if you read a script by somebody else and there's a dense page of stage directions, people just skip through it or speed read it.

If action scenes just happen decontextualized, they lose their weight and the viewer can feel they don't make sense and that they wouldn't have happened that way.

There are people who've told me cinema is a visual medium and you don't need to say so much. When I write the script, all these lines of what the characters are thinking are written. Once the film is shot and the lines are dubbed, I tone it down in postproduction if I feel it gets heavy.

A scene has to have a rhythm of its own, a structure of its own.

In an action film you act in the action. If it's a dramatic film you act in the drama.

To try to create a character without a whole lot of information can be taxing. At the same time, it's fun to just stay on your toes and let the next bit of dialogue come in, and turn the page as you read the next script and see what they have in store for you next.

There are a lot of visual marks that have to be hit, and lines that need to be said in a right way - so there wasn't really any improvisation on the set when it came to the bulk of the script.

It took me a long time to realize that you have to have a bit of an interlanguage with actors. You have to give them something that they can act with.

You have to understand the tone of the movie, because if it's supposed to be funny, it can be funny violent like the Home Alone stuff, but you have to really understand the tone of what you're doing and make the action work for that and for the character.

Everything we do on 'Luck' is absolutely no different than if we'd had been doing it in a feature film. There's no short cuts. The specificity of what every single line might mean. Everything Dustin Hoffman does. Kevin Dunn is as authentic in the last scene of the last episode as he is in the first scene of the first episode.

I'll tell you, Quentin Tarantino really writes the most amazing dialogue.

A lot of directors want to storyboard you, whereas the best way to get a performance out of an actor is a collaborative process where you listen to the actor's input.

What I perceive in science fiction is that it's more about how everything looks than what's going on, which I think is just difficult if you're an action character. I think they are about character, not about what it looks like.

My films express me, my sense of rhythm, my sense of impact, my sense of kinetic energy. I like films to move, but I like also clear storytelling and characters, and most of all, I like authentic emotion.

The thing that I like about action sequences is that if they're done well, you get to know more about the character in those few minutes than you do through 10 minutes of exposition.

Because of 'Terminator 2,' you get not pigeonholed but circled as one of those guys who can understand their way through a movie like that and hold it down.

It's hard to tell writers, especially in movies, that words are secondary. Behavior is important.

I like making movies that have some of the qualities of first-person shooter games. That was very important to me for the 'Bourne' franchise.

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

I look at the action scenes as placeholders when I arrive on a script, knowing that I'm going to expand on them when I understand the constraints of the movie, the locations of where we're shooting, the abilities of the actors, and where we want to go with the characters.

I think what I look for in a script, it's the relatability quotient that matters the most.

Whatever I do - whether it's directing, producing - I just come at things from characters, from stories, from jokes and scene rhythms. I'll always have that at the epicenter, I think.

In film, I believe things should either be documentary or drama.